Work-around for ligature pasting?

[marcusmarcusrc]

I often need to copy text from adobe pdfs and paste it into other programs (Word, Mozilla), and something that happens in Windows XP is that when pasting words containing ligatures* ("fi", "fl", and presumably other ligatures that are less common) an extra space gets added after the ligature in the pasted =document: eg, I copy "efficacy" and it becomes "effi cacy". Is there a way to turn this off so I don't have to waste time deleting these extra spaces?

*this is a new vocab word for me... just learned it when trying to google for this problem.

Comments

[tirinian.livejournal.com]

I have no solution for you. But I will be visiting DC this weekend, if you're around and have free time. :-)

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

Alas, I'm visiting Boston this weekend. (You make at least 3 Bostonians that will be in DC while I'm gone... I clearly need to schedule my trips better)

[tirinian.livejournal.com]

Oh well. Perhaps we will wave at each other at the airport or something. :-)

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Poking around on the web seems to suggest that you want a PDF->Word converter, rather than cut and paste. :-\

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

Hrm. Well, it is good to know that there is a solution out there, but... when I want one paragraph of a 100 page document, PDF->Word seems like overkill. Ah, well. Deleting spaces by hand it is!

[mjperson.livejournal.com]

What's up with having ligatures in modern fonts anyways. I thought that was just done with variable kerning now.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Variable kerning isn't as good. For example, in most (non-fixed-width, non-display) fonts, you really want a ligature for "fi" that doesn't have a separate dot over the I.